Opening up a can.

What's the best way to open a can?

Seems like a simple question, but canned food has been around since 1811, and there have been many means to open those cans in the last 212 years. 

Do you prefer the standard handheld opener with the wheel perpendicular to the top of the can? One of the newer variety with the wheel horizontal to the lid, so you can slice the whole lid off? Do you insist that Spam and other ham products had the right idea, including a key with each can for easy opening? Or do you refuse to get anything comestible in cans but liquids? And if so, do you demand pop-tops or do you use an old-fashioned "church key" type opener?

Some will say nothing beats an electric can opener. But even then you have choices. There are the kind my mom used to have that held and rotated the can as the blade bit into the metal. Then there are the mini ones that actually go around the top on their own. 

If you are a purist, you might like the levered handheld item that had a crescent-shaped blade on top to work around the can. This was considered a safety improvement over the real old-fashioned methods. 

A search for "can opener" on Google Patents yields "About 16,520 results". Goodness gracious me, there seems to be a lot of effort and thought put into a simple question of getting the contents of the can from the inside to the outside. 

Why do I bring this up? Because you know and I know that if we had a bunch of people together in a room and had this discussion, there'd be no agreement on the answer as to which can opener is "best" -- we'd be lucky to get a 50% majority for any one type. And that's on a subject that really isn't a big deal. How can we ever expect to agree on anything serious? Between conflicting visions of what is best and conflicting ideas of how to get there, it's amazing we ever get anything decided at all. 

And this is why I firmly believe humanity is incapable of achieving any kind of utopic society: We're just too ornery. 

Other animals can agree on everything. Every wolf would agree that a piece of meat is good. Every chipmunk might be happy in an identical hole. But it’s not the way we are. To paraphrase from Adam Rex, every cow you meet is the world's greatest expert on being a cow. Every bumblebee knows 100% of everything about being a bumblebee. But people? We have no idea what we're doing a lot of the time. In groups, even less of the time. 

What got me down this road was thinking about Advent, about the Bible, about what we have been given to learn and live by the faith, and I thought maybe it would be nice if we'd had more. But then I figured some people would demand still more, some way less; some would want something different; something more concrete or alternately more artistic; some would want it in blue or black or stripes. In other words, no one thing would seem to be a perfect fit on its face to all of us, even if it really is a perfect fit as we dig deeper into it. 

But man, we sure are malcontents. It keeps us striving for more and better, but it also can get in the way of enjoying what we have.

By the way -- skip the electronics; just more wasted counter space. Handheld classic with the perpendicular wheel. You wanna fight over it?